This is an interesting exchange of ideas about open access journals between Matthew Cockerill, the editor of BioMed Central, and John Enderby, vice-president of the Royal Society. The centre of the debate is about the fact that publicly funded research Read more…
Groklaw smugly reported this earlier. Steve Ballmer asked computer industry to create a computer worth $100 USD. A company called Solar PC has met the challenge with a small computer that runs Linux by using live CDs. BTW, aren’t Live Read more…
The BBC reports that accounts in the popular game Half-Life 2 have been cancelled by the manufacturer. The developers were able to require authentication for the online part of the game, and have been able to shut them down. I Read more…
The latest version of Kazaa now offers internet phone technology from Skype. This seems to be a natural progression for their P2P technology, enhancing the possible non-infringing uses of such networks. However, Kazaa still suffers from spyware, and it has Read more…
Trust James Boyle to cut through the nonsense and provide an excellent picture of what is taking place with the calls for more protection for databases. The evidence is finally taking shape that more protection for databases in Europe has Read more…
CNN reports that new software is being designed to tackle art forgeries. The software conducts a mathematical analysis of the piece, uses some algorithms and establishes wether a piece is forged or not. I am guessing that this will work Read more…
The Nosoftwarepatents.com website has posted a statement by European OSS superstars Linus Torvalds (Linux), Michael Widenius (MySQL) and Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) against software patents. The statement pleas to the European Council to consider the damage caused by software patents. They Read more…
A new bill has passed in the United States which makes it a criminal offence to record movies in the theatre. The new bill had provisions that criminalised file sharing, but consumer pressure was enough to get them to drop Read more…
Attempts by the United States to obtain an agreement to ban cloning have stalled. Many countries oppose an all-out ban and prefer to maintain options open in things like stem cell research. Good news, but I wonder if the Bush Read more…
The latest FUD from Microsoft may just be mere rubbish. Steve Ballmer recently made it clear in a conference in Asia that Linux violates 283 software patents. The problem is that this is done by quoting a study that actually Read more…